Hymnal announcement and free PDFs

It’s been quiet around here at Grace Music the past few weeks. But we’re happy to announce…

The hymnal is done.

After months of editing and revising, it’s finally finished. The PDF is in the hands of the printers, with an expected turnaround time of a couple weeks!

We’ve been blessed by a team of excellent editors, folks who have offered their expertise free of charge to serve the church. They spent hours carefully checking spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, part-writing, and a host of intricate music engraving guidelines. The result is, we hope, a collection that is free from distracting errors, easy to read, and pleasing to the eye.

Since most of the hymns were part-written from scratch, we took time to “field-test” every arrangement with the Grace Chorale, carefully singing through parts to check for smoothness of voice-leading and ease of finding parts. Our vocalists often provided helpful suggestions about harmonic lines that would be more intuitive and easier to navigate for amateur singers. We also expanded the number of songs to 255, included a large amount of Scripture (NASB), and added a Scripture index. The total page count is 350— thick enough to feel substantial, but slightly thinner and lighter than conventional hymnals.

FREE PDFs now available

The hymnal is a mix of old and new, and quite a number of newer songs by modern hymnwriters (Keith Getty, Stuart Townend, and others) are under copyright agreements that require royalty payments per copy. While we can’t provide these songs as free PDFs, we are making available all the ones that are public domain, as well as all modern ones which we were given permission to include without having to pay royalties.

We’ll be putting all these resources on Grace Music in a more intuitive format soon, but for now, we’re making available PDFs of all the songs that we’re able to distribute for free (nearly 200)! The songs are not combined like they are in the hymnal— that is, some songs carry over into a second page, and in this format, there’s a large amount of white space. But these free PDFs give you to access to nearly 80% of the hymnal.

To download the free PDFs, click the icon:

Digital resources coming

Soon we’ll be making the complete hymnal available to purchase as a PDF download. We’re also working on developing a hymnal app, as well as instrumental resources to complement the vocal format.

Pre-ordering

Just a reminder that you can pre-order copies of the hymnal here. We expect it to be ready sometime in April. Stay tuned!

Not to us, O Lord, not to us,but to Your name give glorybecause of Your lovingkindness,because of Your truth.